heresay.

An MFA is a funny degree. Unless you’re completely delusional, and many artists are, you don’t think it’s going to land you a job in your field, and yet MFA programs are thriving. I think, more than anything, it’s the idea of finding like-minded people, people who care about words, color, light, meter, chapter breaks, and ideas more than they care about food and shelter. As much as I look back on my time in Iowa as complete and utter madness, I did love being in the company of people I understood.

People want you to want what they want. If you want the same things they want, then their want is validated. If you don’t want the same things, your lack of wanting can, to certain people, come across as judgment.

The test of beauty is not that it is perfect, but that it always attracts.

Glancing around at the others as they listened to Daddy, at the charmed smiles... and then back at his face, relaxed and open, mellow with reminiscence, a face so different from the one he so often presented, at least to his family, I wondered suddenly whether there might be people, strangers he had met on business trips, say, bellhops or stewardesses or conference attendees, to whom he showed only this kindly face, and who, therefore, would be as astonished by the expression of contempt that we knew so well as we were by the rare glimpses of the other, softer side. How many sides did my father actually have, I asked myself, and which was the “real” one?... Children always imagine that their parents’ truest selves are as parents; but why?... Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysteries to them. Or, I thought a moment later, maybe both were his true selves. Maybe Daddy, too, was polytropos; maybe, as that adjective suggests so powerfully in the Odyssey, identity is less a matter of binary oppositions, the contemptuous or the kindly, the father or the husband, the father or the son, than it is of kaleidoscopic perspective. Maybe it’s a question of which section of the circle, the loop, you happen to be in a position to see.

Homer’s skillful manipulation of the parallel homecomings reminds us of a familiar psychological truth: that a strong sense of what our own family is like, what its weaknesses and strengths are, the relative degrees of its conventionality and eccentricity, its normalcy or pathology, is often impossible to establish until we are old enough to compare it intelligently with the families of others; something we start doing only when we begin to perceive, as happens at the end of childhood, that our family is not, in fact, the entire world.

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

Fifteen years later, when she was a scholar, the experience led her to formulate a hypothesis: how we seek to spend our time may depend on how much time we perceive ourselves to have. When you are young and healthy, you believe you will live forever. You do not worry about losing any of your capabilities. People tell you “the world is your oyster,” “the sky is the limit,” and so on. And you are willing to delay gratification—to invest years, for example, in gaining skills and resources for a brighter future. You seek to plug into bigger streams of knowledge and information. You widen your networks of friends and connections, instead of hanging out with your mother. When horizons are measured in decades, which might as well be infinity to human beings, you most desire all that stuff at the top of Maslow’s pyramid—achievement, creativity, and other attributes of “self-actualization.” But as your horizons contract—when you see the future ahead of you as finite and uncertain—your focus shifts to the here and now, to everyday pleasures and the people closest to you.

The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.

Perfection is satire in the way that adult life itself is a comedy.

‘Maybe I don’t want a bucket list at all. I think what I want is just to live like we do anyway – you know, do our work and go for walks and watch Come Dine with Me – but have a slightly nicer version of it. Normal but better. Call it “Normal plus”.’ ‘“Normal plus”,’ says Nick. ‘I like that. Let’s aim for normal plus in everything we do. So when we go out to see a film, we upgrade to slightly nicer cinema tickets.’ ‘Exactly. And we eat nicer food than we would have done normally.’ ‘When we watch Come Dine with Me, we have exotic snacks,’ suggests Nick, ‘and therefore elevate the experience.’ ‘Exactly.’ Eve laughs. ‘We eat kiwi fruit and mango slices. Get us!’

Our indifference to money was a luxury we could afford only because we had enough of it to avoid real poverty and the need for hard or unpleasant work. Our open-mindedness was bound up with a cultural background and the sort of activities accessible only to people of our social class. It was our conditioning as young petit bourgeois intellectuals that led us to believe ourselves free of all conditioning whatsoever.

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence...

And this, of course, is when the world turns glamorous. Her daughters look like movie stars in their low-slung pants and pale autumn complexions. The trees on her street vibrate in the afternoon sunlight, the dying leaves so brilliant that she somehow feels she’s never seen any of this before—fall, and the way the landscape can levitate with color, and even her simple cup of green tea in the afternoons, with milk and honey in a thick white mug. Warm. Her hand curled around it, or the newspaper folded beside it, or a halved orange on a blue plate sitting next to it. It’s all lovely beyond words, really.

Love is like this, Faye thinks now. We love people because they love us. It’s narcissistic.

...something about Laura’s attitude left him feeling passive-aggressive. This was an Introduction to Literature course, but she cared less about literature than she did about points. It wasn’t the topic of the course that mattered to her; what mattered was the currency. It reminded him of some Wall Street trader who might buy coffee futures one day and mortgage-backed securities the next. The thing that’s traded is less important than how it’s measured. Laura thought like this, thought only about the bottom line, her grade, the only thing that mattered.

“Sincerity is a non-value in art.” —Robert Storr, lecture at Pratt Institute Once a work of art leaves the studio and arrives in the larger world, your sincerity is a weak predictor of the work’s success. Outside of the studio, your work must stand on its own and reveal itself without your being present to defend or explain it. A sincere artist can make weak work, and an insincere artist can produce masterpieces. Don’t try to defend a work’s shortcomings with protestations of good or sincere intentions. It isn’t part of the of the larger world’s criteria of judgment... Once your work leaves your studio, it will be judged on what viewers find there. If your intention is not manifested in the body of work itself, it is of little consequence. You will not be present to explain it and defend it. Viewers, and posterity, have the last word on a work’s meaning.

Art is a process of discovery through making, and our ability to discover is generally greater than our ability to invent. Think of your work process as a form of travel. Look for the things you don’t know, the things that are revealed or inadvertently uncovered. It is easier to find a world than to make one.